For many SMEs, merely keeping up with the knowledge required to remain competitive is a full-time job – let alone
training staff to become competent in those areas.

Training and educating staff is an ongoing struggle. As technology and data underpin every industry, competency in key areas won’t just be a matter of hiring the best people for the job – it will also be about training existing workforces.

Cloud computing sounds compelling, but deployments often bog down in details and internal politics. The key to making the most of cloud computing is to recognise the breadth of solutions it offers but choose just those options that meet immediate business needs.

In the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) era, worker demands have to be balanced against business security requirementss. What strategies does your business need to keep everyone happy and productive? This is an extract from Lifehacker's new ebook Working Smarter: The Technology & Tactics You Need To Get Ahead In Business; download the full version here.

Servers remain the backbone of business IT infrastructure, but in the cloud era your choice is far more complex than just choosing hardware and an operating system. We walk through the key factors you need to consider and the strategies you can use to maximise the performance of your server systems.

Technology was supposed to make life easier, but the end result is often that we feel more swamped than ever. How can you make the right technology and organisational choices to work smarter, not harder? This is an extract from Lifehacker's new ebook Working Smarter: The Technology & Tactics You Need To Get Ahead In Business. Download the full version here for free.

Our core mission at Lifehacker is to help you do things better and more effectively. Our Working Smarter ebook gathers together some of our best advice to help your organise your life and deploy server and cloud technology to run your business effectively -- and you can get the entire ebook for free.

Author of the upcoming book The Power of Less Leo Babauta offers a companion ebook that's free to download now. Thriving on Less—Simplifying in a Tough Economy tells you how to do just that. The 27-page PDF describes advice garnered from Babauta's own journey from clutter, debt, and scarcity to a simpler, frugal lifestyle that focuses on the essentials and cuts away the extras. Like Babauta's popular Zen Habits blog, this book offers calm, peaceful straight talk that makes the super-busy and overwhelmed think "I want to live like that." Looks like a great preview of what's to come in his print volume, which gets released this week. Think Babauta's approach is possible in today's world or too idealistic? Let us know what you think in the comments. Free Ebook: Thriving on Less - Simplifying in a Tough Economy

At some point, anyone who's interested in personal growth and productivity has to ask him or herself: What the heck am I doing with my life, anyway? It's a big scary question, one that's easily avoided by checking out the coolest new Firefox extension instead. But if you've decided to tackle the beast, reader William Mize recommends a free ebook entitled What Do You Want to Do With Your Life?. The 136 page PDF is a workbook for creating your life plan. Mize says:

We already told you that Dymock's had added downloadable audio books and ebooks to their website in November, and now it has launched its promised ebook reader, the iLiad. iLiad is about the size of an A5 piece of paper, and weighs in at 389 grams. It has 128mb of memory available to be used, and you can add memory capacity in the form of compact flash or
MMC card.You can also read from
USB devices.You can upload books to the iLiad from a computer wirelessly,
via USB cable or from a memory card. You can make notes on docuements using its stylus.It supports a range of formats - PDF, HTML, TXT, JPG, BMP, PNG  and PRC (Mobipocket - the format used for ebooks in the Dymocks store).I haven't gotten to see an iLiad yet, but they've got them on display at the George Street store in Sydney. They're also selling them on their online store.The SMH points out that the $899 iLiad failed to gain market share
when it was launched in the US about a year ago. But probably the most
high profile ebook reader currently on the market, Amazon's Kindle, is
unlikely to be sold here.Unlike  the Kindle, iLiad doesn't allow you to use 'always on' wireless to buy books on the go. The SMH story quoted
Dymocks as saying iLiad's internet connectivity is mainly for uploading
software updates.And if the $900 pricetag doesn't phase you, you probably won't mind paying an extra $90 for the leather carry case either.